Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 29, 2009 @ 12:48 AM
One of the challenges in breaking a verbal habit is that it's nearly impossible to fix it by making your adjustment only while at work. In my telesales training classes, two of the most prevalent habits we work on correcting are the "you guys" and the "how are you today?" habits. And to fully correct them, you need help from the folks with whom you live (and play). Before we discuss "How are you today?" and its inherent problems, I want to review "you guys" for a bit. In the telesales courses I teach, I try to get people in our classes to stop referring to the prospect's company as "you guys", as used in "how are you guys addressing [the technology in question] today?" Especially when you're calling high, using "you guys" doesn't work very well in peer communication with a high level executive, and many women are resistant to that term at any level. "You guys" makes it sound like you're an adolescent, as well, and the prospect almost anticipates the word "awesome" to follow somewhere in the conversation. A better approach is to use the name of the company you're calling in place of "you guys", so let's say the company we're calling is called QED Technology. All you'd have to do, to sound a lot more professional, is to restructure your question by asking "how is QED addressing [the technology in question] today?", inserting the appropriate technology issue in the brackets.
So back to "How are you today?", the topic of today's post. It really doesn't matter too much whether or not you use this on a warm call, where you already know the prospect. Where it really hurts you is on a cold call. At an executive level, you will get hung up on frequently if you open a call with this question. In one of my coaching sessions recently, even though we rehearsed a better way to open the call, the rep did it anyway through habit, and got slammed immediately. There are a number of reasons not to begin your call with this shopworn phrase, but the main reason is that business-to-consumer telemarketers have been flogging it for decades, and it's associated now with getting interrupted by a telemarketer during the dinner hour. It's disliked so much that there's even an acronym for it (HAYT) because people "hate" the question so much from someone to whom they've never spoken. It's much better to open your call by saying who you are, why you're calling, and telling the individual what you need. In most cases, you need to know if there's a current initiative looking for a solution that your product or service can fix. Pretty good way to start a call.
But fixing ineffective communication habits often isn't easily done at work, so I recommend asking personal friends to help out. If you're in the HAYT habit on cold calls, ask your significant other, family, and friends to stop you whenever they hear you using the term when on the phone making personal calls. Chances are, you'll soon get tired of them nailing you, but you will break the habit. And once you've broken it at home, you'll pretty much have it licked at work.
It's hard enough to reach people these days, and you only have one opportunity to make a great first impression. Avoid using words and phrases that annoy people, and enlist the help of friends at home when you really need to fix the problem. A friend of mine once ran for Superintendant of Public Instruction on the platform of "inculcation of sophisticated spoken English." You don't need to go that far to be a great business communicator, but professional speech is terrifically important, especially when speaking to high level executives. Add that level of professionalism to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 22, 2009 @ 01:49 AM
I was coaching a rep during a telesales call last month, when she said to her prospect "So, I assume that you'll need the development process to run more efficiently" (she sold application development solutions that streamlined the development process). The prospect at that point became annoyed, and testily responded with "actually, we're pretty efficient as it is now, what have I said that indicated it wasn't?" (he was a Director of Software Development). While the prospect had other reasons for looking at the rep's solution, efficiency wasn't one of them, so by "assuming," she hurt the rapport she'd spent all call building up, and had to back up a notch and say she was mistaken for putting words in his mouth.
Fact is, we never know exactly what our prospect wants, or thinks, unless we ask through an "open" question, or the prospect volunteers the information first. We're never as smart as the prospect, as much as we try to be. In my telesales training courses, I discuss the concept of being "intelligently ignorant", which means that you want to ask a lot of questions, even if you think you know all the answers. In the United States today, there's lots of "assuming" on the part of companies looking for ways to attract customers, and all it does is result in products and services that reflect the least common denominator. Many Thai restaurants, for example, are making their tam yum goong (spicy prawn soup) with hardly any spices because "Western people don't like spices." As a result, the soup is nothing like you'd find in Thailand, and in many cases virtually inedible, but the Thais think they're doing the Yanks a big favor by lowering the quality of their product. For years, Ford has been marketing the cute, sexy, high mileage "Ka" car in Europe, but doesn't do it in the U.S. Did they ever ask the U.S. consumer if he or she wanted a car like that? Probably not, because Japanese automakers seem to be selling all the sexy small cars in the U.S. right now. And how's the U.S. auto industry doing these days, by the way? I could give you many other examples, but I think you know what I'm saying. By failing to ask the prospect what he or she wants or thinks, we're losing information that is essential to getting more customers and making the sale. In each case above, the "manufacturers" force-fed product to the customer, and in doing so failed to provide leadership or attempt to educate the prospect. And they're losing business because they assume the customer isn't bright enough to make an informed decision. Regardless of what you're selling, I hope you'll understand the metaphor.
Getting back to telesales, now, why not consider dropping the "assumptive" habit yourself? Instead, change the way you ask questions. Try to avoid asking questions that begin with the words "Is... ?" or "Are...?" , which most often lead to assumptions. Instead (and here I'll use applications development examples, for continuity's sake), try the following ways of asking a question:
"Describe", "Would you explain", "Would you elaborate on" and "Tell me about" are great words and phrases that you can use to start learning more by having the prospect tell you in his or her words where the problem areas are.
As much as some people seem to be telling us, there aren't all that many "one size fits all" sales situations, whether it's soup, cars, or development tools. You owe your prospect your best quality solution, and the way you diagnose it is by asking good open questions prior to making recommendations. Focusing on asking your prospect about his or her priorities should be your priority. So be "intelligently ignorant", assume nothing, and add open questions to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 15, 2009 @ 01:22 AM
I've written before on the critical importance of using strong professional verbiage to position oneself as a peer when calling high and talking to a prospect at the CXO, VP, or Director level. Asking permission ("Is this a good --- or bad --- time to talk?") and beginning the conversation with "How are you today?" are two things I strongly suggest you do not do on a cold call, because by doing so, you're giving the subtle message that you don't really have anything important to say.
Today, I want to discuss some additional weak verbiage that will erode your position as a peer to higher level prospects, namely the use of diminutive phrases that convey the feeling that you are not as important as the people to whom you're speaking. Four of the most common are:
1) "I'm just..." (as in "I'm just calling to see if you've looked at my proposal yet.")
2) "I'm new here." (or "new to the territory")
3) "Are you the decision-maker?"
4) "Would it be all right if I called so-and-so?"
Each one of the above phrases erodes the confidence that the prospect needs to have in you, and you stand to be in danger of losing the business to a competitive rep with more professional communication skills. Not only should you not use these phrases with high level prospects, you shouldn't use them with lower level prospects either. Let's discuss them individually:
1) "Just" gives you no justice. In my example above, it's more like a whine, and is reminiscent of how a child talks to a parent. Remove that word "just"from your telesales vocabulary to fix the problem.
2) Prospects like talking to "the buck stops here" reps that have all the answers, or at least project an image that they do. They don't care whether you're new to the territory, the company, or the planet, but they need to have confidence that you're the right guy or gal. Save "I'm new here" for bar talk, not business talk.
3) Who's going to answer that question with "no, I'm not the decision-maker'? Most of you reading this blog sell or qualify leads for companies selling enterprise solutions, where one individual rarely makes a unilateral buying decision. To get the information you're trying to get, ask "How does the decision process work?", and you'll obtain better information about all the people involved in the decision, and sound more professionally savvy as well.
4) Asking permission to do anything rarely invites a positive response, and when you're told "no", then you feel uncomfortable in going ahead and doing what you're paid to do, which is calling everyone in the decision process to ensure that you've comprehensively qualified the opportunity. You should have the philosophy that you'll call anyone at the prospect company at any time, and feel confident enough that you don't have to ask anyone's permission to do so.
Using professional verbiage is not only important in communications with prospects and customers, it's terrifically important within the sales department too, particularly when you're in close communication with field sales reps. As inside sales professionals, we fight an ongoing battle to prove to our field sales colleagues that we know just as much as they do, are as smart as they are, and can close as much business as they can. Many field sales people feel that if telesales people were really clever, they'd be working in the field instead, a prejudice many of us in the telebusiness industry have spent years in the process of changing. In my telesales training courses, I always find time to discuss the fact that inside sales has to be more efficient, more effective, and more professional than our field counterparts, because we've always got something to prove. And one of the best ways to do it is to use powerful, professional verbiage, and kick those weak phrases out of our vocabularies for good. Add powerful, no-nonsense terminology to your Best Practices playbook, and you'll increase sales and improve team communication at the same time.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 08, 2009 @ 01:00 AM
I'm conducting one of my telesales training courses this week for a network solutions company that has a challenge common to many inside sales organizations, namely cold calling into companies where there has been no prior telephone contact, at any level. In some cases, there are individuals that have downloaded whitepapers, attended tradeshows and seminars, or signed up for webinars, but in most cases, there has been no previous "touch" at all. In calling these companies, it's absolutely critical to mine the prospect's website for clues that can be used to turn the cold call into a warm call.
There are several critical things you can find by visiting your prospect's homepage, and you can do it all in three minutes or fewer (if it takes longer, you'll never meet your call metrics, so you have to know what to look for, and how to find it). You'll want to focus on your solution, and find clues on the website indicating that the prospect company could have a need. If you sell application development tools, for example, you'll look for indicators that the prospect is building applications; if your prospect is selling its own applications on its website, you now have additional ammunition you need to make a more meaningful opening call.
Here are a few classic web elements that are indicators that the prospect could potentially use a solution like yours, if you provide development or networking solutions, as an example. If you don't sell these types of solutions, you can use this as a template to create a list of your own "hot" web indicators for your solution. Look for elements such as these that you can refer to when engaging your new "cold" prospect:
- Bill paying capability
- Online account management
- Order entry
- Reseller portal
- Taxes or auto registration
- Shipment tracking
In addition, scan the homepage for any corporate news that could be valuable, such as acquisitions or mergers, or press releases or whitepapers mentioning the thoughts and ideas of upper-level management. This data will be critical when calling high, and again, turns your cold call into a warm call.
Your prospect's website is invaluable in telling you how the company makes its money. As I've said many times, prospects will only buy solutions if they will help the company to make money, or stop losing money. To build rapport and begin strategizing an ROI-based sales formula with your prospects, learn these three things from your website research:
- what product or service your prospect company sells
- who buys its products and services
- how its customers buy those products and services
And last but not least, check the Management page to determine the name of the appropriate CXO. It's better than any other source on the internet, because it's always current.
If you take the steps I've outlined in this post, you'll find your cold calls go a lot better, because you've taken some important steps that prove to your prospect that you know his or her company well enough to make an intelligent value proposition based on intelligence instead of guesswork. Remember to take 3 minutes or fewer per prospect (the more you do it, the more efficient you'll get), and add this powerful technique to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 01, 2009 @ 01:38 AM
After nearly 30 years in the business, it's pretty hard to shock me, but just this last week I became aware of two factors that some managers are weighing as they hire new inside sales people: college SAT scores and memberships in fraternities and sororities. I've never known these factors to be elements critical to the successes of telesales reps, so let's drill down a bit. If you're a manager who heavily values these, I'd like to you to reconsider. Here's why:
I've got a couple of degrees myself, and have attended more than one university. Frats and sororities were mainly known for one thing, and it wasn't academics! Many students I knew didn't have time for extracurricular activities, as they were busy working a part-time job to put themselves through school. They were learning the ins and outs of business while they were students, and many were developing leadership and team communication skills on the job while paying for their university studies. These are people that shouldn't be ignored in the hiring process, because they tend to be self-starters, are used to hustling, and "entitlement" is not a word often found in their vocabularies.
SAT scores are not a predictor of telesales success either. I had a fairly high SAT score myself, but even then realized that it was more a measure of test-taking ability and rote learning than it was an indicator of creativity and business savvy.
So what do you look for when hiring an inside sales rep? Look for somebody that's got something to prove! I've trained and coached thousands of reps in my telesales training courses, and many of the best came from lower-economic backgrounds, where their parents never attended college, but spent their time working in blue-collar jobs to get their kids ahead. And their kids worked, too. Many of these great telesales reps were children of immigrants, and were among the first members of their families to ever attend college. They were never on track to become members of Greek societies, and juggling work and studying in high school may not have given them an astronomical SAT, either. Nevertheless, they had something to prove. To their parents, to their fellow students, and to the world in general. They were bound and determined to make it, they were going to figure it out, and they were going to succeed!
If there's a lesson here, it's this: when you hire Inside Salespeople, don't be so concerned that your prospective employee comes from a good background, had a high GPA in college, and has all the right social contacts. Instead, concern yourself with finding people who see your opportunity as a dramatic step up from their past jobs, who have something to prove to themselves (and to you.) They might not have attended college, either. They might be restaurant servers who have great people skills but don't want to depend on the vagaries of tips anymore, actors who can tell a good story, are great listeners, and are curious about the world they live in, or rental car agents ready to incorporate their people skills into the technology sales world. I've seen many high-performing reps come directly from job situations such as these. They are motivated by a new career and tend to be quick studies that can hit the ground running, rapidly embrace new concepts, and become productive almost immediately.
Regardless of what testing companies will tell you, I've never seen a test that can predict success in inside sales, but if I'm talking to a prospective inside sales rep that's got something to prove, I'm going to listen! I always ask people that I train to tell me a little about their backgrounds, and I'm constantly impressed at the varied backgrounds in my classes, and how these talented people have used those backgrounds to be creative in sales and better understand the business environments of their prospects and customers. So if you're heavily weighing test scores and the college social milieu when hiring your telesales reps, I urge you to reconsider. If you don't, you'll be missing out on some of the best.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 25, 2009 @ 01:19 AM
Every day I monitor my website to see what search terms people used to arrive at www.alextrain.com Today, someone searched on "how should a telesales person dress for work". I've never addressed the issue, but this comes up sooner or later in virtually every telesales department. So here's my answer, with an important caveat (see below):
A telesales person could dress in a clown suit or be nude (some at-home workers do this, I'll bet), and as long as he or she is a producer, it doesn't matter. One of the perks of working in inside sales is that you don't have to "dress for success," like you would if you were in outside sales. There is no extant data of which I'm aware that links professional dress with telesales success, so if you're an inside sales manager, I'd give a lot of leeway to how your inside folks dress, and prioritize productivity challenges instead. One of the best telesales people I ever worked with was John Dee, and I don't believe I ever saw John wear anything but shorts to work. John's management was smart enough to recognize that John was an all-star, and John responded by making great numbers and treating his customers really well. So there's an example from the real world in terms of how little dress really means to telesales success.
Now here's the caveat: if you're an inside salesperson, and you have a goal of eventually getting into management, you will have to dress for success, from day one. A good rule of thumb is to dress like your executives dress, whether it's business casual or in suits. It's an unwritten rule that execs always notice the good dressers in the work force, and if you dress well, you will be noticed. And when it comes to getting promoted, superior dress habits are definitely factored in, although not always explicitly discussed. So if you're a telesales rep that's on a mission to run your own department someday, please consider investing in a professional wardrobe if you haven't already. It's never too late to start dressing professionally, so if you don't, and want to get considered in the eventual management picture, why not start tomorrow?
The subject of dress rarely comes up in my telesales courses, although once, as we were returning from a break, the class was engaged in a spirited discussion of naked telemarketing from home. I put the kibosh on it, returned to the curriculum, and suggested the class take up the subject in off-hours. I've got a lot in my telesales curriculum, but nothing on that!
So bottom-line, dress any way you want as long as you're making your numbers, but do keep an eye to professional dress if a promotion to management is something you see in your horizon.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 18, 2009 @ 12:25 AM
As salespeople, sometimes we're so happy about getting an order that we forget to do an important bit of upselling, namely telling the prospect what he or she could get with a little more of an investment. When I go out shopping, I'm sometimes confused by the vast number of products and options available in virtually everything I buy. And frankly, many salespeople don't do a very good job helping me. A classic example is what happened recently when a friend bought a laptop computer, as I was along for the shopping trip. And yes, there's a sales tip here that is relevant for telesales people.
My friend was focused on getting a certain brand of computer, looked at all the models, read the specs, and decided which one he wanted. So he asked the sales rep to pull one out of stock and write up the order. "Just another question," I said, "what's the next step up?" The rep showed us a more pricey unit, but with a better screen. As it turns out, my friend often views multiple documents on the same screen, and that better screen was worth the money, so my friend bought it. But the salesperson never asked, so I had to!
In my inside sales courses, I preach a lot on the value of asking the prospects' needs, but even the best reps sometimes forget. So here's a sales tip want you to consider. The next time you're writing up an order, just stop for a moment and tell the prospect the following:
"From what we've discussed, I think this solution is going to fit your needs very well. Before we start on the paperwork, let me take a moment to tell you what just a little more of an investment will buy you." Then tell the prospect, and let him or her make the decision.
As a consumer, I can't tell you how many things I've bought that were upgrades from what I originally intended to buy, from cars, to electronics, to antiquities. In each case, I had to ask the salesperson about "the next best thing." About 50% of the time, I bought the higher-end item. Sometimes it was thousands of dollars more, but I was a lot happier with my purchase. You can get into this habit yourself while shopping for almost anything. Always ask about the next step up. Once you do, you'll probably finding yourself paying a bit more, but getting better stuff! An old sales adage says that "when you buy quality, you only cry once." And you can transfer this habit to your own sales prospects. Make this one of your call objectives. Always tell them about what they'll get if they pay a little more, and add this sales technique to your Best Practices Playbook, and I'll bet you'll increase sales numbers, too.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 11, 2009 @ 01:30 AM
Acquiring a superior skillset for closing sales is a lifelong proposition, and one of the things I tell people that attend my telesales training classes is that you always want to be in learning mode whenever you're buying something yourself. You can pick up great techniques when buying from good sales reps, and you can also learn what not to do when buying from sales reps with poor sales skills.
There are three ways I've seen sales reps repeatedly lose easy sales, and this week's post describes what they are, along with examples of how they occurred. Although my examples are all from face-to-face selling, they occur in telesales as well. And they all have one thing in common, which I'll discuss at the end of the post. Here they are:
1) Thinking the prospect is too ignorant to understand your solution. Sometimes arrogance can prevent a salesperson from making a sale. When I founded my company, I needed to buy a really great car to replace my hot red Camaro, which was not an appropriate business car. I went to a Mercedes dealership dressed in blue jeans, because if I was going to be involved in price negotiations, I didn't want to look like an easy target. The sales rep came out to meet me, and my first question was "Tell me why I should buy a Mercedes." He told me to go to the library. I'm not kidding! I told him if I wanted to go to the library, I'd already be there. Instead of asking me why I was even considering a Mercedes, he just walked away. And so did I. The rep mistook my good question for an ignorant one, and didn't get the sale.
2) Not being persistent enough to stay in touch with prospects that contacted you first. Still thinking a Mercedes might be a good choice, I found another small dealer that had a bunch of classic Mercedes vehicles in a very large garage. He was informed, treated me well, and I told him I'd return the next day to test drive one. The next day, he referred me to his nice-looking daughter, who was a salesperson for his company. I picked one I liked, and asked her for a test drive. She told me it was too much of a bother to move a few cars to get that one out, and that typically Mercedes buyers knew what they were looking for. So I said thanks and walked away. Neither the nice Mercedes guy or his daughter ever called me back. I guess I wasn't a very good buyer. A couple of days later, I bought a nifty Porsche 930 Turbo from someone that let me take a test drive and didn't treat me like I was an idiot. A little bit of persistence from the Mercedes people, and they might have been able to get me back and sell me a car.
3) Forgetting that Sales is primarily about taking care of the needs of the prospect, not yours. One day my laptop computer died, and I desperately needed another one, as I was designing a sales course that had an immediate deadline. I walked into a well-known national computer company store where they had several on display. There were two salespeople sitting at a desk in front of a computer, and since neither had greeted me, I went over to them instead. "I've got a question about that laptop over there," I said. "Sorry," replied one of them, who appeared to be a manager, "we're doing sales training right now. Can you come back tomorrow?" I looked at the fellow that was being trained, and said to him "You have nothing to learn from the sales training you're getting right now." I walked out, and they let me go. I drove further down the street and bought a laptop that I took home on the spot. The manager at the first store could have paused the sales training to do some real-time mentoring and assist his salesperson in getting the sale, but was so focused on what he was doing at the moment that he caused his store to lose a sale.
So what do these three "lost sales" situations have in common? They were all "bluebirds." Companies spend thousands of dollars every year on marketing list mailings, trade shows, seminars, and websites, attempting to encourage bring serious buyers to contact the company. Inbound calls we call "bluebirds" fly in through the sales window, but it's not by accident. Someone worked real hard in the background, trying to get the prospect motivated enough to make the first contact. Each of the examples above represents a bluebird, a situation in which the buyer needed the product, had money, was ready to buy, and just needed the salesperson to make it easy. Because the salesperson was focused on his or her agenda rather than the prospect's, the sale was lost, and a competitor got the business. In a complex sales environment, sometimes it becomes all too easy to ignore the simple stuff and take the business when it's virtually handed to you. Those bluebirds represent the results of a tremendous amount of effort on the part of your marketing department. Please don't make the mistake of thinking the inbound prospect is ignorant or wasting your time, even if his or her questions aren't predictable. If the prospect calls, it means something. These people probably have a list of three of four companies they're going to call. If you do a great job of understanding their needs and offering an appropriate solution, you may be able to handle sales objections, prove the effectiveness of your solution, do some price negotiation, and get the order on the spot without having to do an evaluation or demonstration. After you've done your qualifying, never forget to ask for the order, even if it's on that first inbound call. Bluebirds don't happen by accident. Add this approach to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 04, 2009 @ 01:30 AM
This has got to be one of the more serious sales objections in any salesperson's day, and because technology is moving so rapidly, can occur at almost any time. I'll tell you how it happened to me, and what I did about it.
I once sold a hardware-based software debugger, a great product, and we sold thousands for $5000 each. One day, a new competitor came up with a product that did a lot of what ours did, and sold for $400. We tested it, and it was a great product! The only feature difference was that it didn't have something called hardware breakpoints, a feature that not all software developers needed. So I had to reposition our product. I never like to knock the competition, so I decided a good approach was to "damn with faint praise" and position our competitor into a small corner of the developer world. Our prospects and customers were savvy buyers and read all the journals, and a large percentage of them started asking how our product, which cost ten times more, stacked up against theirs. And even if they didn't need hardware breakpoints, here's how I responded. Let's call their product the ABC Debugger:
"ABC makes a really good product, and it's terrific if you're building a home software program to run a sprinkler system. But if you're in serious production mode, and have a hard timeline for getting a product to market, our debugger is the only way to go."
Of course, I had to sell the value of hardware breakpoints, too, even if the value wasn't perceived initially. You know that I place a real value on asking ROI questions, which I teach today in my telesales training courses, so I knew what they were building, who their customers were, and had an idea of how much revenue that product was going to produce for them. My customers' concerns about product rollout timefames turned out to be way more important than a $4500 cost differential per unit, and our sales never faltered. Within a year, our own engineers developed a new flagship product that sold for $20,000 and was wildly successful, but we never stopped successfully selling our $5000 debugger, either.
Damning with faint praise is a great technique when your prospect brings up the name of a worthy competitor. Use it along with your important ROI questions, and add it to your Best Practices Playbook. And if you have another way to handle this sales objection that's worked successfully for you, tell us about it!
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Apr 27, 2009 @ 01:29 AM
I regularly monitor a few sales websites, and a good question was posed the other day about whether to openly discuss the competitor's solution, or totally avoid mentioning the competition. I'm pretty opinionated on this. Here's my answer, followed by a brief explanation:
"I will never be the first to bring up the name of a competitor. But I will always ask "What other solutions are you considering?" I not only want to find out who is competing with me, but also want to get a sense of the prospect's global ideas about solving the problem. Also, be wary that your prospect may have already made a decision to go with the competition, but is "shopping" you to get price data to use to lower the price of the already-chosen solution. When I was purchasing solutions myself, I did this to salespeople all the time. I've blogged on this shopping practice, and what to do about it at http://www.alextrain.com/inside-sales-telesales-tips-blog/bid/5564/RFP-Hazards-Are-you-being-shopped-by-Purchasing-Agents-Here-s-how-to-fix-it "
I'm a real believer in never bringing up the name of a competitor before the prospect does, and it's just one of the things I teach in my telesales training courses. When you do that, you place the competitor on a peer level with you, and I can almost guarantee that if your prospect hasn't talked with your competition, he or she almost certainly will right after you've hung up the phone. In one fell swoop, you've brought your competition into the sales picture.
Occasionally, the prospect will ask who you compete with. I hope you've already asked great qualification questions that will uncover reasons that your solution is the best in the marketplace for the prospect, and you'll have a unique value proposition that argues that you have the best solution. So my response to the question about my competitors goes something like this: "There are a number of companies competing in this space, Jerry. Based on what you've told me, we're the one that is by far your best solution, for the following reasons [name them]. The reason I work for [my company] is that we provide the best solution in the marketplace, and my customers get exceptional support and get taken care of really well. If I thought any of the companies that compete with us were better, I'd be working for them."
Savvy prospects (and they're all savvy) hunt around the web for different solutions, and mostly they're testing you to see how you'll respond to the "competition" question. Going back to the days long ago when I was a purchasing agent myself, I'd always ask every vendor salesperson who he or she competed with. Many of the salespeople weren't sophisticated enough to provide an answer like I gave in the paragraph above. So I'd call 5 or so vendors, get the names of the competitors from them, then rank those competitors based on the number of times they got mentioned. Much of the time, I'd choose a vendor based on that ranking, then negotiate a lower price based on the price data I'd gotten from the others. Don't you fall into this trap!
So now you've got a great way to handle the "competition question" and ensure that you're dealing with future price negotiation issues at the same time. Add it to your Best Practices Playbook. And if you have another way of dealing with the question that's been effective for you, tell us about it!
Next week's blog post: What to do when your competition is cheaper (and maybe better!)